A. Homes - May We Be Forgiven

“I never had it.”

“You would love — rice gruel like cream of wheat.”

I nod.

“Prawn?” she asks.

“Yes,” of course.

“Bok choy?”

“Frequently,” I say, if only to make conversation.

“My sister owns a restaurant in Los Angeles and my cousin has one in Westchester County — we are what you call foodies,” she says, putting more rice in my bowl.

After lunch, the mother slips me another Hershey bar — it has quickly become our tradition. “Chocolate is keeping your spirits up,” she says.

On the way back to the firm, I stop at a Super Store for office supplies. I go up and down the rows, admiring the plenty. I find tape flags in fluorescent colors that I can use to notate Nixon’s use of language and theme so that it remains consistent but not overly repetitious or redundant.

Clutching my bag of goodies, like adult penny candy, I enter the elevator and push “16.”

“Working hard?” a guy behind me asks. He’s standing behind my left shoulder; I can’t see him without turning around.

“You bet,” I say, trying to turn in his direction. I see only the brim of a baseball cap, a blue windbreaker, dark pants and shoes, and what I assume to be a nondescript man between fifty and seventy, white, unremarkable.

“I’ll keep it brief,” he says, speaking without changing his tone. No one else in the elevator seems to be hearing him or is the least concerned.

“You really don’t have a clue — you’re like a love-struck kid. The whole thing goes deeper than you can imagine. For one, Chotiner had his fingers all over everything. And two, even if it was unconsummated, it was one hell of a love affair between Dick and Rebozo. Three, it’s common knowledge that Nixon was in Dallas the morning of the assassination, and so were Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis. Isn’t it a little too convenient that they were also the Watergate burglers — take a look at the hoboes, or Secret Service agents, on the grassy knoll. And Ferrie’s damned library card was in Oswald’s wallet!” He laughs, and one woman in the elevator turns to look. His voice lowers to a whisper. “They were all in and out of Cuba, playing both sides — and the Mafia. Check out who was there and bingo — it’s a triple play.” A pause. “Did you know Jack Ruby worked for Nixon in 1947 under the name Jack Rubenstein? My point, buddy boy, is: you’ve got nothing, the big zippo.”

A sound involuntarily escapes me, a cross between extreme excitement and gagging.

“It’s nothing to laugh at. Let me be perfectly clear,” he says, and his phrasing has a familiar ring. “It wasn’t one guy in particular, but a group of guys. No one’s hands are clean. Pawns, we’re all pawns. There’s no man that can’t be bought and no man that can’t be brought down. It was like a freak show.” He stops for a moment. “Uncle Bebe bought your little Julie a house as a wedding gift. Do you think she registered for that at Tiffany’s? I keep track of these things. I’m a history buff. The government used to be filled with guys like me, guys who think they know something, who are smart but not smart enough — sons of bitches. Watergate was a domestic incident, ‘a bizarre comedy of errors,’ as Nixon called it, that got blown out of proportion when you look at the rest of it. As Nixon himself said, ‘You open that scab and there’s a hell of a lot of things and we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves.’” My man stops for a second, then starts again, this time doing the most uncanny imitation of Richard Nixon: “‘Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that ah, without going into the details … don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’”

He stops, clears his throat. “So how are you liking the stories?”

“I like them,” I say, forgetting for the moment that no one knows about the stories.

“Did you get to the one about the SOB?”

I nod.

“That one’s all about me,” he says, winking. The elevator opens and he steps out. “Double-check your homework, and good luck.”

I ride all the way up and then back down to the lobby and ask the guard at the front desk if he could show me the video loop from the elevator. I see the guy standing in the one blurry spot, as if he knew exactly where to be. All you can see is the brim of his baseball cap — you can’t even tell that he’s talking to me, except that I appear increasingly agitated and am looking around as if to see if anyone else is hearing what I’m hearing and what it means to them.

Is it some kind of test? I don’t want to make anyone nervous, but, on the other hand, if it’s a test from the inside, it would be smart to report it. I ask Wanda if she might come into my office. She comes as far as the doorway and then stands there while I explain about the man, the baseball cap, and so on.

“He stood behind you,” she says. “Seemed to know exactly who you were, told you things you hadn’t heard before.”

“Yes,” I say, excited we’re on to something.

“Nothing on the surveillance video?”

“Just a blur,” I say.

Wanda nods. “He’s been here on and off over the years,” she says, unimpressed.

“Who is he? Like a crazy hanger-on?”

“Something like that,” she says. “There used to be others, but there aren’t too many left now — it’s generational.”

I’m still concerned.

“The world is filled with people,” Wanda says.

I stand waiting to hear the rest — but Wanda says no more.

How many others? How much more is there to know? I get the sense that, once one begins to dig, the information stream is not only endless, but passed under the table from administration to administration, as though there is some much larger playbook that only the President and his men are privy to. And clearly, once you take a look at that playbook, not only are you forever changed, but the twists and turns of party politics braid the cord of information and deal making so much that true change becomes impossible.

Who wrote the playbook? And when? Is anyone in charge? It is all such a gnarly web that at best one can only pick at the knots.

“Everything okay?” Ching Lan asks when I get back to my desk. “You look discolored,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“Erased,” she says, “very white, like paper.”

I nod. The man in the elevator was dropping a lot of little beads about things I didn’t want to hear. The man he was talking about wasn’t my Nixon, he wasn’t Nixon as I wanted him to be. He wasn’t the youthful RMN as a vice-presidential candidate, accused of using campaign funds for personal expenses, going on national television, and making sure the people knew that he was of modest means.

Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we’ve got is honestly ours. I should say this — that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.

This man’s Nixon was darker, more menacing than I ever allowed myself to imagine. Upset by my own naïveté, I wonder, Can I allow myself to know what I know and still love Nixon as deeply as I do? Can I accept how flawed, how unresolved he was, the enormous fissures in personality, in belief, in morality? Is there any politician who hasn’t sold his soul ten times over before he even takes office? The mystery man in the elevator told me what I didn’t want to hear, and on some level I know it all might be true. For some this might be a turnoff, but it draws me closer, makes RMN all the more human. He clearly wasn’t the first or the last to have gotten confused with regard to the boundaries between executive power and imaginary superpowers — he just may have been that rare bird who documented himself more heavily.